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By Isabel Fonseca

Alfred A. Knopf, 306 pages, $23.95

Oh, to be Isabel Fonseca! A stunning brunette with high cheekbones and that glam international surname that suggests a yummy pairing of fontina and prosecco. Second wife of Martin Amis, easily among the top five writers working in the English language (never mind those scathing reviews of his recent Sept. 11 essay collection; part of genius is just being brave and prolific)—surely they’re not snarling at each other over whose turn it is to clean the cat’s litter box. Author of Bury Me Standing, a Serious Nonfiction Work about gypsies that took her four years of intense, virtuous immersion research ... and now, with consummate versatility, of a novel as fruity and delicious as the cocktails served on the fictional tropical island of St. Jacques, where it’s primarily set.  read more »

An incendiary essay by New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier about Martin Amis’ recent essay collection on 9/11 and the evils of Islamism ran on the cover of the New York Times Book Review last weekend. The review was an evisceration, built on Mr. Wieseltier’s contention that Mr. Amis aestheticizes politics and tragedy for his own narcissistic purposes.

Sample snippet: “Amis is the sort of writer who will never say ‘city’ when he can say ‘conurbation.’ In his first article about Sept.  read more »

THE SECOND PLANE: SEPTEMBER 11: TERROR AND BOREDOM
By Martin Amis
Alfred A. Knopf, 211 pages, $24

Martin Amis’ The Second Plane is a collection of essays, short fiction and book reviews arranged in order of composition. It thus functions, in some ways, as a walking tour of the motley post-Sept. 11 mind—its fears, madnesses, misapprehensions and insights. While the book’s first essay, written in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, aches with the same “reflexive search for the morally intelligible” (as Mr. Amis elsewhere calls it) that animates the desperate relativism of the paleo-left, the end of the book finds him, having now enlightened himself on modern Islam’s intellectual traffic jam, condemning the very same left’s “hemispherical abjection” to the “Thanatism” of radical Islam.  read more »

Would you be surprised to hear that a surging tide of books about politics is about to engulf us?

Later this month we’ll get a chance to peruse War and Decision, by Douglas Feith (HarperCollins, March 25). Mr. Feith, a neocon promoter of the Iraq War, was famously identified by Gen. Tommy Franks as “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet.” It’s unlikely that Mr.  read more »

Is it still schadenfreude when it’s the indestructible Martin Amis getting kicked around? His new book, a collection of essays and stories about militant Islam, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007, won’t be published over here until April Fools’ Day, but it’s already out in the U.K. (Jonathan Cape, £12.90) and was greeted last weekend with a one-two punch that would have left any ordinary writer reeling. On Saturday the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) ran a review by the talented Christopher Tayler that concludes bluntly that “the writings collected here add nothing to [Amis’] reputation.” On Sunday, the London Times (www.timesonline.co.uk) let loose historian William Dalrymple, who declares Amis’ book to be “not just flawed, but riddled with basic misunderstandings”; and again, in case we were in any doubt: “not just wilfully ignorant … but … at its heart disturbingly bigoted.”  read more »